The challenges and changes of old age escape us - if we let it

Megan Schimpf Prescriptions

My brothers and I used to spend a week every summer with my grandparents, who would shamelessly spoil us. We'd sit around the entire afternoon and eat popsicles and potato chips, and then go to a movie or a baseball game. Birthdays meant piles of presents that later meant hours of fun with new toys instead of clothes or money or something else boring to 10- and 12-year-olds.

And then the years passed.

And gradually we all got older.

Until one day I turned around and they were old. Not just grandparent old, but old-person old.

The gulf between older and younger people grows until the day when strength and vibrance fade a little and things change forever. It is difficult, as someone who is currently in the prime of life, to comprehend the day-to-day routine of someone who has aged. It is a life without planners, lunch dates, coffee shops, new music or a quick pace. Instead of eight things in an hour, there are one or two events a week that become immeasurably valuable. These little things, these all-too-short times with loved ones, become preciously anticipated and clung to.

It is a life lived vicariously through children, nieces, nephews and grandchildren.

And through oneself, years ago.

It is a time, instead of looking ahead and wondering what the future holds, to reflect on what one's life holds in its history. It is a time to pass on that knowledge, instead of absorbing it.

To young people, unfamiliar with serious confusion and able to recite any number of passwords and PINs, the loss of lucidity that eventually accompanies old age is frightening. To those of us accustomed to knowing minute detail for bubble exams and blue books, it is unsettling to comprehend how a mind could forget when one's spouse died or how one's parents died. Or why the mind can remember one's own date of birth but not one's age.

It is even more confusing to watch a person you know and love regress from the self you remember. And to know that you have forever lost part of who that personality was.

But you have not lost that person. Yet.

The safe little world called childhood is sealed away safely forever in memory. But time moves on, and changes become noticeable. Suddenly, part of that security disappears: If old age can claim someone who was once strong and protecting, what will it eventually do to you?

This immediate frailty and mortality are deeply unsettling and tear at the naive security of believing everyone will live forever. In the midst of fearing the distant future comes the desire to grasp onto the present. So you buy a tape recorder to remember voices and stories. You take pictures and frame older ones. You take the time to visit, even if it causes havoc to the rest of your week.

Because there's still something there, but it won't last forever. And now you realize it can't always be the way it was.

I spent time with a 94-year-old woman earlier this week who says she is ready to die. The statement sounds as bluntly real as it is.

And yet she is not waiting to die, a trap many older people either fall into or are assumed to have. Her personal determination has taken her from a wheelchair to a walker to a cane. She walks up and down a hall six times a day to avoid becoming a "sitter." Physical therapy every morning and night is building strength, preventing dizzy spells and allowing the simple freedom of moving her fingers at will.

Unclenching her fist is an act of incredible pride.

But she can do it.

Our inclination is to be surprised and impressed by these simple acts of dexterity and perseverance, to look at this woman through two good eyes and with our nimble fingers and smile as if we were looking at a 5-year-old who just finger-painted. Because little things like walking without falling down are not consciously appreciated by most people in their 20s.

Yet here is the truth: She is living. She has goals, she has a schedule, she has friends to talk to and she has conquered some of her demons. She refuses to take the easy excuse and live out the rest of her days.

So she is not the person she once was. She doesn't remember everything; she has made some compromises to the years.

She is trying to keep some of what she was - and is. Things cannot stay the same forever. They grow, they age, they change.

It's not easy and it's not the best. But it's what we have.

- Megan Schimpf can be reached over e-mail at mschimpf@umich.edu

10-02-97